Elephants are fine animals, but the Unicode standard features a distinct and disturbing lack of guinea pigs — as well as capybaras — severely limiting the range of my digital expression.
capybara and guinea pig are both far less popular than taco or emoji
interestingly, the spike of taco in google trends seems like it might be correlated to it's addition to emoji - that spike would be about a year after iOS got the Taco emoji.
They're disadvantaged in the cute-animal stakes by their name, I think. The name implies something large, dangerous, and possibly mythical; it really doesn't fit with "round fuzzy thing somewhat smaller than a cat".
If marketers found that any vote spontaneously creates the invested interest a democratic process needs then we all would have starved during the subsequent storm of pointless elections.
Certainly. Capybaras are semi-aquatic mammals, and their head as a consequence is positioned significantly higher than their bodies, resulting in a general pose which can only be described as 'regally aloof'.
Cavies on the other hand look like adorable furry idiots with a much less angular — in fact, rotund — outline.
Aside from both being rodents and (apparently) delicious, these are quite different animals.
They also feel extremely different to the touch. Capybaras have really rough coats! They're not soft at all.
You could tell a guinea-pig-sized capybara apart from a guinea pig, or a capybara-sized guinea pig apart from a capybara, blindfolded. Probably anyone who expects guinea pigs to be soft but has never met a capybara would get it right on the first try.
My implication was "at the resolution of an emoji" - you can clearly tell the difference in real life, but what about when you only have 18x18 pixels to work with?
If you can't tell the difference between a capybara and a guinea pig, you won't be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog either. The former pair differs more in terms of their silhouette than the latter. 18×18 probably means you won't be able to tell quite a lot of emoji apart, but don't blame these rodents for that.
Maybe after Han unification we also need a squirrel unification and leave this distinction to the font which is picked based on the region you're in ...
That being said, I already cannot parse many emoji and would love tooltips what they are supposed to represent in all places.
> There is already an emoji for frog, which can be used to represent all amphibians.
I'm not a big fan of this example. Does "lizard" represent all reptiles? "dog" all mammals? I suppose salamanders are taxonomically similar enough to lizards that specific amphibian emoji aren't necessary for them, but that's not the reason given.
Once they open the door to other amphibians, they will end up getting drawn into the whole "do toads exist" debate, and it frankly just isn't worth it.
These guidelines note that emoji proposals for "specific people, whether fictional, historic, living, or dead" will be rejected outright, but most versions of the rockstar emoji are an obvious Bowie homage!
Unicode Consortium definitely jumped the :shark: with emojis.
It's such a bad system for actually doing beyond poor humor, yet they pretend it is doing useful things.
> Other examples of fixed complete sets are blood types {A B AB O},
Meanwhile, that's such a simplification that nobody actually uses just that information:
> As of 31 December 2023, a total of 45[2] human blood group systems are recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT).[3] The two most important blood group systems are ABO and Rh; they determine someone's blood type (A, B, AB, and O, with + or − denoting RhD status) for suitability in blood transfusion.
While a perfectly reasonable request on its own terms, it also definitely reminds me of the brown M&M story, which if you are one of today's 10,000 [1], is https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/ .
It is actually something more of reducing the number of faulty submissions, because the popularity alone doesn't get emoji registered. Everyone should look at the L2 register to see a (very tiny) portion of emoji proposals that clearly motivate this section and others. (Most proposals are directly sent to the Emoji subcommittee, so the L2 submission is relatively rare.)
It's a clever idea to use another search term as the baseline as long as Google refuses to give any indicator of absolute search usage in the Trends graph.
...until the Great Elephant Incident of 2025 comes along and messes up the search trends...
The commercial petitions for taco played no part in its selection; the taco was approved based on evidence in its proposal, not the petitions.